LEICHHARDT LONG GAME
Italian Forum, Parramatta Road and the Suburb’s Next Chapter
Leichhardt has always carried a story bigger than its geography. For a long time, it was “Little Italy” – the Sunday lunch suburb, the espresso suburb, the place people went for pasta and stayed long enough to feel like they’d accidentally joined someone else’s family. That story has faded at the edges, but it hasn’t ended. It’s evolving.
The Italian Forum is the clearest symbol of that. When it opened in the late 1990s, it was designed as a piazza – a piece of Italy staged in the Inner West, complete with colonnades, apartments above, restaurants and shops around a central open space. It was ambitious and, for a while, it worked. Then foot traffic thinned. Some of the original restaurants closed. More recently, the last of the old-guard Italian venues shut its doors, marking the end of an era and sparking questions about what, exactly, the Forum should be next.
Parallel to that nostalgia is something much more utilitarian: Parramatta Road.
For years, everyone agreed that Parramatta Road was broken – too much traffic, not enough charm. The solution, on paper, became the Parramatta Road Corridor Urban Transformation Strategy: a plan to incrementally rezone land within a block or so of the road and turn a tired transport corridor into a series of connected urban precincts. Leichhardt sits squarely in that vision.
The most recent twist is sharper: the state government signalling its intent to rezone a long stretch of Parramatta Road from Leichhardt through to Camperdown to accommodate around 8,000 new apartments. The language is blunt – Sydney needs more homes, and one of the places they’re going to go is above and around this road that has, until now, mostly been something people endure on their way somewhere else.
Put those two elements together – a piazza in need of a second act, and a major corridor being set up for residential density – and you get Leichhardt’s long game.
On one side, you’ve got Norton Street and the Forum: a cultural heart that could be re-tuned, re-activated, turned into something genuinely compelling again if someone with the right vision and patience steps in. On the other side, you’ve got the inevitable climb of residential stock along Parramatta Road: shop-top housing, mid-rise apartments, mixed-use developments wrapping themselves around future transport improvements.
The question isn’t whether Leichhardt will change. It’s what kind of change the suburb wants to own. A version of the future looks like this: the Forum revived as a genuine cultural anchor – Italian, yes, but broadened out to reflect the suburb as it is now; Norton Street evolving into a more interesting mix of old and new; Parramatta Road becoming less of a scar and more of a spine, with actual residents living above what used to be dead frontage.
For owners, this is a positioning story. Houses back from the main roads continue to trade on the classic Leichhardt formula – character, backyards, walkability. Apartments near the Forum and along Parramatta Road start to play a dual role: places to live and pieces in a longer, bigger transformation.
Leichhardt’s strength has always been that it knows how to host people. Sunday families. Midweek diners. Late-night stragglers. If it can learn how to host its own future residents with the same generosity – across piazzas, side streets and a reimagined corridor – the next chapter could be less about mourning what was lost and more about being surprised at what was possible.
— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal